The EU-Japan Workshop

At the 10th EU-Japan Summit held on 8 December 2001 in Brussels, an Action Plan for EU-Japan Cooperation was adopted, which listed concrete measures to be taken in order to further promote Japan-EU cooperation. Objective 4 of the Action Plan states that Japan, in collaboration with the EU, will organise a symposium consisting of intellectuals, politicians, experts and journalists, with a view to considering how best the EU and Japan can develop civil society links, cultural contacts and people-to-people exchanges.

In this context a EU-Japan workshop was organised on April 9 in Brussels. Almost seventy people, including academic experts, youth and student exchange leaders, NGO representatives and journalists as well as officials from governments of Japan, the EU member states and the European Commission participated in the workshop. The aim of the workshop was to assess the current situation in this area and to prepare the symposium that will be held later this year.

There were active and intensive discussions on the following three themes: Intellectual and youth exchange, including researchers, academics, students, school exchanges, language studies etc; Civil society exchanges including NGOs, social partners and regional/local institutions and people to people exchanges including twinning, tourism etc; Cultural and media exchanges including sport, music, arts, cinema, journalism, TV etc.